STAFF WRITER
CHRIS POTTER

There has been one constant throughout the entire 33-year history of the women’s basketball program: head coach Phil Kahler.

The women’s teams here at Fisher have never known any other leader. Kahler started the program from scratch, overseeing its creation just three years after Fisher began admitting female students.

Fast forward more than three decades from those humble beginnings, and Kahler has established Fisher as the all-time winningest women’s program in Division III with a career NCAA record of 735-149 through Jan. 20, including two national runner-up finishes in 1988 and 1990.  

Imagine, then, the shock created by the news that Kahler would not be on the bench to start the 2006-2007 campaign. A heart attack suffered in late October would keep him sidelined for the first two and a half months of the season. As a result, Fisher was forced to play without its legendary leader through eight non-league games. More important, however, were the health concerns of coach Kahler.

After  several months of rest and rehabilitation, Kahler is now well on the road to recovery. “Everything is going very well right now,” Kahler said. “I have rehab three days a week, but it doesn’t take that long, usually only an hour and fifteen minutes.”

Apart from the required physical activity, perhaps the hardest thing coach Kahler experienced was being forced to spend a prolonged amount of time away from his team for the first time.

“It wasn’t fun, I can tell you that,” Kahler said. “Since it was out of my control, there wasn’t too much I could do about it. I was proud of how the kids responded to the situation, though.”

Similar to Mike Krzyzewski at Duke and Pat Summit at Tennessee, seeing someone else on the sideline calling the shots doesn’t feel right. Although interim head coach Marianne O’Connor Ermi was put in a tough situation, she did a more than capable job of pulling the team together. In Kahler’s absence, O’Connor Ermi led a team that features 15 freshmen to a very respectable 5-3 record.

“Coach did a great job with an inexperienced team,” Kahler said. “We’ve been together for 21 years, so she’s really an extension of me out there. She carried on what we’ve done here in the past. That, along with the fact that we kept in daily contact, made the transition back to the bench rather easy.”

Kahler returned to the Cardinals for the Jan. 5 match-up with RIT and promptly led Fisher to a 58-56 comeback victory. Since his return, the Cardinals have won three out of five games, including Empire 8 conference victories over RIT and Nazareth.

While he humbly continues to go about the day-to-day tasks of running the Cardinals, Kahler’s excellence extends far beyond X’s and O’s, to who he is as a human being. His return to the sidelines represents a model of perseverance and dedication that is an inspiration to every Fisher student.